Of course anecdotes are of very limited usefulness, but I had exactly the opposite experience. The HDDs that failed on me, failed slowly with SMART errors that gave enough time to make a backup, and never failed completely. On the other hand I had a cheap SSD die completely and without any warning after only limited use, and experienced bit rot even on reputable vendors.
tl;dr choose what you want but make backups
I like the default OSM carto style, however as an everyday map while walking I mostly use Streetcomplete (or sometimes everydoor) as I like the ability to make edits.
I use both versions actively, the main differences of SCEE compared to StreetComplete are the addtion of more obscure questions (for example building and roof colors, species/genus of trees), allowing direct editing of tags and disabling the gamification/statistics.
(when-not (> a b) (> b a))
If you are looking for cheap storage, i recommend you check out diskprices.com . At least it helped me sometimes to find the disk with a low price per TB.